Many products, such as food related products, beauty and fashion items, home, hardware and repair supplies, automobile related products, electronic products, such as televisions, radios, cell phones, personal computers (PCs), games and packaged PC software, and the like, after manufacturing, are generally moved to a distribution center or warehouse. A distribution center controls the flow of the various products from receiving to storage to shipping. For example, products are received in the warehouse and moved to storage locations termed slots, and selected products are then moved from their slots to placement in shipping containers to be sent to marketing endpoints, such as grocery stores, department stores, and the like. It can be appreciated that a haphazard method of storing products in a warehouse can lead to high costs due to inefficiencies in locating and moving the products. Further complicating the flow of products in a warehouse, is the varying demand for each product, such as experienced from an initial product introduction, through promotional and seasonal demands, to phase-out of the product. A produces distribution cost is overhead that reduces profits and increases the price consumers must pay for the product.
A physical warehouse is generally built with shelf racks in various configurations with each shelf containing labeled locations, called slots, for item storage. Slots in a warehouse may also be identified by marking locations on a floor, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, barcodes, a combination of such identifiers or otherwise. Operations performed in a warehouse include, for example, assigning items to slots, storing items from a receiving dock into assigned slots, and retrieving items from assigned slots and transporting them to a transport dock. Warehouse slotting systems generally exist to guide users as to where to place items in a warehouse.
In an active warehouse, it is difficult to relocate items to different slots that are more optimum for accessing ordered items due to the items being actively picked from currently assigned slots. Also, changing item characteristics and slotting rules require that slot assignments change frequently. Changing slot assignments usually involves, among other things, relocating active items that are currently in the process of being picked for shipment, and inactive items, which are rarely picked and therefore occupy slots for long periods of time.